Sew Many Layouts: National Poetry Month

Bumping up to remind you of the challenge due this week...


If you know me, you know I am a Hokie... I graduated from Virginia Tech in 1998. I found myself there... who I was, who I wanted to become. I still miss Blacksburg, over a decade later. Whenever I return, I feel as though I've gone home.

The shooting of 32 people on April 16, 2007 on campus devastated me. Though I wasn't there and didn't personally know any of the people killed, I felt as though I had lost part of my family.

Poet Nikki Giovanni is a professor at VT. She gave an amazing speech at the end of the memorial service the day after the shootings. That is what I chose to include on my layout (underneath it is my own journaling about the day).



Here is the text of the speech...
"We are Virginia Tech. We are sad today and we will be sad for quite awhile. WE are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning. We are Virginia Tech. We are strong enough to know when to cry and sad enough to know we must laugh again. We are Virginia Tech. We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did not deserve it but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, but neither do the invisible children walking the night to avoid being captured by a rogue army. Neither does the baby elephant watching his community be devastated for ivory; neither does the Appalachian infant in the killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy. We are Virginia Tech. The Hokie Nation embraces our own with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong and brave and innocent and unafraid. We are better than we think, not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imagination and the possibility we will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears, through all this sadness. We are the Hokies. We will prevail, we will prevail. We are Virginia Tech."

The title frames and green/blue photo frames are from Sarah's Supplies.

You can view the rest of the DT layouts and the sketch that we used HERE.

This is your chance to enter the Sarah's Supplies/SMC Layouts contest! Entries are due by April 16. Click on the below banner for more details.